Mexican culture is family. It’s being home and feeling the warmth of comfort and love. It’s the smell of sweet milk chocolate in the morning and homemade cemas (wheat bread). It is knowing that your parents and loved ones will always lend you an extra pair of helping hands in time of desperate need. It’s neither violent nor selfish. It’s not criminal or abusive. Last and foremost, Mexican culture is not just having children for lack of contraceptive, but for love of family.
Whether Mexican culture is understood or not, it is still definitely judged and interpreted like any other culture. It may be frowned upon or stereotyped based on individual poor action taking. The truth of the matter is, not everyone understands the causes of countless damage done to cities and people in Mexico. Not everyone bothers to learn about the hardships Mexican people undergo. Even more depressing, not everyone bothers to learn about how to help. But regardless there’s definite lack of global knowledge in the America. The same lack of knowledge that is responsible for promoting unethical cultural assumptions.
The widely used cosmetic brand MAC launched a new collection last September in collaboration with the infamous fashion brand known as Rodarte.
The brand featured inspirational colors linked to the cultural aspects of Mexico.
But how can someone truly understand what defines the cultural aspects of Mexico if they’re not culturally tied to it to begin with? Mexico is much more than sombreros and folk. Mexico is much more than the green, white, and red. Mexico has a history. Whether that history is good or bad is up to those who have experienced it to answer.
The recent line featured different products including a sheer white lipstick called "Ghost town" and a pink blush named "Quinceañera".
The name might not necessarily sound offensive, but to those who have lived something incredibly life changing it means the world. To those who have been a part of a real ghost town of murders and harassment it is hard to be desensitized of such terms.
Bertha Garcia, mother of Brenda Castillo, shared the joy of her grandson’s birth, Kevin. Kevin rest in her lap, just one month old, smothered in what seemed to be nothing but peace and harmony. At sixteen months today, he knows his mother only from the fliers his grandmother posts day in and day out. This is one of the stories of many.
Surprisingly, MAC didn't do such a great job distributing proper names to all of their new products after emitting a frosty pink nail polish as "Juarez".
Juarez is a city in Mexico in which there has been continuous involvement in the rape and murder of innocent women and children. The increase of this criminal activity has increased dramatically as the increase of maquiladoras (factories) has gone up. A little before August of 2009, Juarez’s murder rate was considered to be the highest in the entire world, exceeding places like Caracas and New Orleans. In the year of 2008, there were 1,400 murders and more than 2,500 deaths over the same period in the year of 2010. As if that wasn’t enough, these women and children are never bothered to be looked for…they are never bothered to be found. Today, more than 200 are still missing. It’s sick to think they’re still being tortured. It’s sick to think they’re still being kept hostage to fulfill a group of degenerates’ needs. But what was everything but sick was MAC’s line of cosmetics.
What MAC failed to demonstrate and teach was that Juarez is an increasingly impoverished town that suffers of high rates of countless murder.
Gisela Simental shares her experiences in an article published in January of 2010. “I lived in Juarez for most of my life, and one of the things that you often see are children on the streets. These kids are on the streets late at night and during school hours because they have to help their families. The way these children grow up is very harsh -- they are faced with reality from a very young age. Their families are probably very poor and do not have another choice but to make every member of the family work. Children are brought up that way, and have no idea how this will affect them in the future. They understand the responsibility of a job and the need to get money to survive even though they might not know what it feels like to be in a classroom at school. They have no other choice but to work and leave education aside. How will they do better in the future if they are not provided with education right know?”
Education and law enforcement and two among many important issues that have driven Ciudad Juarez from a stable stage, to one of dramatic chaos.
After the issue with MAC’s new line cosmetics, it did however raise a very important point: People have become ignorant of such issues.
Even though through countless surveys, four in every ten Americans say they follow news about world affairs on a close level, many respond “don’t know” to questions about any recent news events. Learning about cultural issues is not a separate discipline, but a perspective that informs and modernizes every discipline. One of our great strengths as a nation is our creativity and determination to lead the world, and using this as an advantage to help fix or help change criminal activity in other places could be phenomenal.
After asking some of Santa Rosa’s community members how they felt about the issue being raised by MAC cosmetics, some said “It sucks that the police force in Mexico won’t admit to a serial killer problem or even a cult & that USA companies hire these woman and won’t protect their own workers...makes me sick.”
Alaina Chenette-Barton of Santa Rosa emphasized “Mexico isn’t the only place that this is going on. This has been happening all over the world. It saddens me and somehow needs to be put to an end immediately!”
Naming a shade of pink nailpolish "Juarez" emphasizes the extensive cluelessness and insensitivity on behalf of the brand, and the general population.
Hundreds of cases have gone and continue to go unsolved and uninvestigated.
MAC further promoted their new link with a secondary nail polish shade "Factory". Coincidentally, most of the women and young girls who have been raped and murdered in Juarez have disappeared on their way to or from work at the town’s factories.
MAC continued to apologize for some of the titles given to their recent products and has consistently been trying to win back offended customers.
As a result, MAC planned to donate all profits to women organizations that aid Juarez. Despite the fact that their new line caused controversy, it was able to remind its consumers and followers that cultural issues do exists and go neglected. The fact that even offended people were able to speak up about their cultural issues demonstrates an interest of change in their own community, a change that should be wanted in every community that suffers of even the most minimal social issues.
Ciudad Juarez may not change its criminal activity, women may not be found, children may not be helped through educational or labor support, but if people care to read and learn about these things, then awareness has been raised.
